[Dixielandjazz] Blossom Dearie Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

February 9, 2009 - NY TIMES - By Stephen Holden
Blossom Dearie, Cult Chanteuse, Dies at 82

Blossom Dearie, the jazz pixie with a little-girl voice and pageboy  
haircut who was a fixture in New York and London nightclubs for  
decades, died on Saturday at her apartment in Greenwich Village. She  
was 82.

She died in her sleep of natural causes, said her manager and  
representative, Donald Schaffer. Her last public appearances, in 2006,  
were at her regular Midtown Manhattan stomping ground, the now defunct  
Danny’s Skylight Room.

A singer, pianist and songwriter with an independent spirit who  
zealously guarded her privacy, Ms. Dearie pursued a singular career  
that blurred the line between jazz and cabaret. An interpretive  
minimalist with caviar taste in songs and musicians, she was a genre  
unto herself. Rarely raising her sly, kittenish voice, Ms. Dearie  
confided song lyrics in a playful style below whose surface layers of  
insinuation lurked. Her cheery style influenced many younger jazz and  
cabaret singers, most notably Stacey Kent and the singer and pianist  
Daryl Sherman.

But just under her fey camouflage lay a needling wit. If you listened  
closely, you could hear the scathing contempt she brought to one of  
her signature songs, “I’m Hip,” the Dave Frishberg-Bob Dorough  
demolition of a namedropping bohemian poseur. Ms. Dearie was for years  
closely associated with Mr. Frishberg and Mr. Dorough. It was Mr.  
Frishberg who wrote another of her perennials, “Peel Me a Grape.”

Ms. Dearie didn’t suffer fools gladly and was unafraid to voice her  
disdain for music she didn’t like; the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber  
were a particular pet peeve.

The other side of her sensibility was a wistful romanticism most  
discernible in her interpretations of Brazilian bossa nova songs,  
material ideally suited to her delicate approach. Her final album,  
“Blossom’s Planet” (Daffodil), released in 2000, includes what may be  
the definitive interpretation of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave” Her  
dreamy attenuated rendition finds her voice floating away as though to  
sea, or to heaven, on lapping waves of tastefully synthesized strings.

Born Marguerite Blossom Dearie in East Durham, N.Y., on April 29,  
1926, she was a classically trained pianist who switched to jazz after  
joining a high school band. Moving to New York City in the mid-1940s,  
she sang with the Blue Flames, a vocal group attached to the Woody  
Herman band, and with Alvino Rey’s band before embarking on a solo  
career.

Traveling to Paris in 1952, she joined the Blue Stars, a vocal octet  
that recorded a hit version of “Lullaby of Birdland.” While there she  
shared quarters with the jazz singer Annie Ross and met the Belgian  
flutist and saxophonist Bobby Jaspar, to whom she was briefly married.

She also met Norman Granz, the owner of Verve Records, who signed her  
to a six-album contract. All six Verve albums — “Blossom  
Dearie” (1956), “Give Him the Ooh-La-La” (1957), “Once Upon a  
Summertime” (1958), “Sings Comden and Green” (1959), “My Gentleman  
Friend” (1959) and “Soubrette Sings Broadway Hit Songs”(1960) — are  
today regarded as cult classics.

In the early 1960s a radio commercial she made for Hires Root Beer  
became so popular it spawned an album, “Blossom Dearie Sings Rootin’  
Songs” (DIW). Her 1964 album, “May I Come In?” (Capitol), a  
straightforward pop collection, was her first to employ a full  
orchestra, but on subsequent albums she veered back into jazz and  
supper-club fare, mixing standards, jazz songs and witty novelties.

Beginning in 1966 she traveled regularly to London to play Ronnie  
Scott’s, a popular nightclub, and while in England recorded four  
albums for the Fontana label. Back in the United States she  
established her own label, Daffodil Records, in 1974. Its first album,  
“Blossom Dearie Sings,” released at the height of the singer- 
songwriter movement, contained all original songs, including “Hey  
John,” a tribute to John Lennon (with lyrics by Jim Council), and “I’m  
Shadowing You,” a collaboration with Johnny Mercer.

Although Ms. Dearie never had a hit as a songwriter (she usually wrote  
the melodies, not the lyrics), a number of her songs have enjoyed  
fairly wide circulation in nightclubs, most notably “Bye-Bye Country  
Boy” (written with Jack Segal), a pop star’s rueful farewell to a farm  
boy she meets on the road.

The last record Ms. Dearie recorded was a single, “It’s All Right to  
Be Afraid,” a comforting ballad dedicated to the victims and survivors  
of 9/11. She is survived by an older brother, Barney, and a nephew and  
niece.